NP-

	This is the JargonFile ^(V4.00) entry for NP- - Next: nroff, Prev: notwork
:NP-: /N-P/ /pref./ Extremely. Used to modify adjectives describing a level or quality of difficulty; the connotation is often more so than it should be This is generalized from the computer-science terms NP-hard and NP-complete; NP-complete problems all seem to be very hard, but so far no one has found a good a priori reason that they should be. NP is the set of Nondeterministic-Polynomial algorithms, those that can be completed by a nondeterministic Turing machine in an amount of time that is a polynomial function of the size of the input; a solution for one NP-complete problem would solve all the others. "Coding a BitBlt implementation to perform correctly in every case is NP-annoying."
* (text is auto-included via JargonExtension by mutante using jargon with VERSION 4.0.0, 24 JUL 1996* - JargonFile by Eric S. Raymond is in the public domain)*